Do I Need A Bigger Swap Partition?

[Jon_J]

I have meanie's pdaxii13-akita5.3.2 installed on my C3200 with very few extras.
I have inkscape installed, and it is a really cool drawing program, just what I've been looking for.
I posted a screenshot showing the memory bar maxed, and it shows that it's using 405% of memory.
Do I need a bigger swap partition?
My swap partition is 256 MB, is there a way to resize it to 512 MB easily?

[ZDevil]

I simply use 128MB all the time, even for onboard compilation. And the swap memory never seems to get filled up.
I suspect the memory issue here has to do with the package itself? Even big boys like GIMP don't behave like this...

[Drake01]

I posted a screenshot showing the memory bar maxed, and it shows that it's using 405% of memory.
Do I need a bigger swap partition?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=156563\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

First, I've noticed this before with other memory hogs.  I really like the effect of the "memory bar" blowing the top off the meter and then spilling onto the floor underneath.

The memory meter is obviously calculating the used memory based on what you should have without additional swap.  Do you know what your actual swap usage is?  The top command should show you how much swap is actually being used.

I know that it's simple enough to create a larger swap partition on external storage, although it's a destructive process that would require you to backup your data from any partitions on the card and then restore after you modify the partitions.  If this is on your internal drive, I have no idea what would be involved.

[Antikx]

typing:

Code: [Select]

free...in a console will tell you how much RAM and swap are being used.

[Drake01]

typing:

Code: [Select]

free...in a console will tell you how much RAM and swap are being used.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=156588\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

That's the command I couldn't think of!

[Jon_J]

With inkscape running and a complex drawing loaded: (this time the MEM/CPU icon disappeared).

Code: [Select]

free
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        62292        60932         1360            0           24
 Swap:       250480       250316          164
Total:      312772       311248         1524I know the above is an extreme case, but lesser drawings consume quite a lot also.
The tiger loaded in the screen shot showed this much swap used. 2480xx
(I don't remember the exact number, but 2480xx is very close)

[ZDevil]

Wow. The tiger is really eating up the RAM ....    

How is the memory usage in a regular Linux box?

[Jon_J]

Wow. The tiger is really eating up the RAM ....     

How is the memory usage in a regular Linux box?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=156595\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

1. I'm mostly a windows guy, I don't have a Linux box at the moment, except my 2 Zaurii.
2. inkscape or pdaxii13 doesn't always "release" all the space used on the swap after closing a program. I mentioned this in the inkscape thread, that restarting 'X' "clears" out the swap, and this is what I usually do after using inkscape for awhile.
3. Sometimes, if you are not careful, you can have 2 copies of inkscape running, and that's what I think happened just before I loaded the "Tiger" drawing.
Opening a new drawing, doesn't close the previous drawing. Also using the "close" icon or command results in the same thing as the "quit" icon or command, and closes inkscape. I don't always close a drawing before opening another one.

[speculatrix]

I think you need more physical memory if you're really using that much. I think it was Seymour Cray, he of the supercomputer legend, who said of memory swapping "memory is like sex, better when it's not fake".

Note that linux is quite aggressive in its use of RAM for buffering and caching, so you have to be quite careful when you assume that having low physical memory left means you've really run out.

[Jon_J]

I'll just open less complex drawings in inkscape.
In the example above, there was no usability in inkscape. The drawing was too complex to actually do any useful work on a Zaurus.
The tiger drawing in the top post is very sluggish also, but it isn't near as complex as the one I had opened when I typed in the "free" command in the example.